January 2011

January 28, 2011

The following is an invitation to you, dear readers, to participate in the annual IPR social media survey. Please take this opportunity to add your experience to the study. --WTP

PR Professionals:

Once again this year, IPR is joining forces with the College of Communication at Boston University and PRSA and conducting a web-based survey measuring how social media is being used in public relations practice. We hope you will be willing to spend 10-12 minutes as a volunteer participant in this research.

All information acquired in this research project will be treated confidentially, anonymity is promised to all participants and individual respondents will not be identified in any way. An article about the results of this research project will be submitted for publication consideration to PRSA’s online scholarly publication Public Relations Journal (http://www.facebook.com/l/08920vB1GRhgch3BJBPnoFIkJBg;www.prsa.org/prjournal). This study’s questionnaire has been approved by the Institutional Review Board of Boston University.

In this paper we investigate the attributes and relative influence of 1.6M Twitter users by tracking 74 million diffusion events... Unsurprisingly, we find that the largest cascades tend to be generated by users who have been influential in the past and who have a large number of followers. We also find that... predictions of which particular user or URL will generate large cascades are relatively unreliable. We conclude, therefore, that word-of-mouth diffusion can only be harnessed reliably by targeting large numbers of potential influencers... Finally, we consider a family of hypothetical marketing strategies, defined by the relative cost of identifying versus compensating potential “influencers.” We find that although under some circumstances, the most influential users are also the most cost-effective, under a wide range of plausible assumptions the most cost-effective performance can be realized using “ordinary influencers”—individuals who exert average or even less-than-average influence.

Also, Duncan Watts has a new book on sale March 29, Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer. Here is what Alan Alda says about it: “You have to take notice when common sense, the bedrock thing we’ve always counted on, is challenged brilliantly. Especially when something better than common sense is suggested.”

As Katie Paine says, influence is the buzzword for 2011. There has been a lot of new writing on the topic. To bring you up to date on who and what is influencing influence, here is a cheat sheet to lists of tools, resources, and conversations. This is not an exhaustive review; there are just too many tools, opinions, and posts. But these links are the best place to start.

Don Bartholomew at Metricsman on Measuring Influence in Social Media: “...determining who has influence should be part of your audience targeting strategy, determining whether or not you are creating audience influence should be part of your measurement strategy.”

Valeria Maltoni at ConversationAgent—Why Everyone is Now Talking About Klout:“Will Klout the brand suffer the long term repercussions of succeeding in being on everyone's mind so quickly, while trying to be all things influence to all people and organizations? Will you or your business suffer because you're focusing too much on one data point and how to game grow it?”

Valeria Maltoni at ConversationAgent— 5 Influence Traps you Must Avoid: “All this talk about tools is a major distraction from the conversation about influence. Because while tools can track what someone does, they most certainly cannot tell you why -- and why is a fundamental piece of information you need to have to understand what moves people to act....”

Lauren Fisher in Simply Zesty: When Bieber tops the list, is influence dead?: “...established concepts including fame, popularity and influence don’t necessarily cross over online... This means that we need to look beyond the numbers and for something more, something that truly takes into account all that we can see, track and follow through social media. It’s not about lists and numbers, it’s about actions.”

Shel Israel on Curation, Influence & Lethal Generosity: “I'm still pondering how people are influenced on the Web and I'm seeing curation as just about the most effective way to do it. Curation can guide people through the perfect storm they face when looking for stuff that is valuable and interesting to them at a particular point in time.”

Don Bartholomew at MetricsMan onSocial Media Measurement 2011: Five Things to Forget and Five Things to Learn: “...there is a big difference between motivating someone to action (e.g. retweeting your content) and motivating someone to purchase which is ultimately the type of influence many companies and brands are most interested in effecting... Creating influence – effecting someone’s attitudes, opinions and/or actions – creates impact but may or may not create ROI in the short-term.”

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement StandardThe Measurement Standard is a publication ofKDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

With all the recent talk about measuring influence in this way or that, sometimes people aren’t seeing the forest for the tweets. No matter how you measure it, here are five things to keep in mind about Influence:

Influence, according to dictionary.com, is “the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others.”

Please note that the operational words are “produce effects.” In other words, Justin Beber may have millions of fans on Twitter, but it’s a pretty good bet that he’s never going to produce any effect on my business. The point is that influence is not reach, it’s the ability to cause action: the power to produce an effect or an outcome.

So if you are a defense contractor and there are only 200 people on the planet that can legally buy your product, chances are it’s not the number of followers you have on Twitter that matters. What matters is that you are in some way, shape, or form reaching those 200 people and the 2000 or so people that influence them.

#4: Behind every influencer is a real live human.

Influence is not a list. It can’t be used like those old Bacon’s directories or MediaMap lists. Influence implies a personal, persuasive relationship between the individual and the audience being influenced.

No IR or AR professional would dream of relying on mass emails to explain a new strategy to a financial or industry analyst. Today’s influentials are no different – in fact they are frequently the same people you used to try to influence when they were in their old media jobs.

So why suddenly, just because technology enables it, do people think they can substitute personal relationships for electronic ones? I’m not saying you necessarily have to have person-to-person or voice contact, but at the very least you need to read what the person has written or posted, and understand what gets them excited.

If you just rely on words, you will assume that, just because this blog is called The Measurement Standard, I’m going to be interested in your new more accurate mechanical probing device. And you will get marked as spam and derided forever in the Bad Pitch Blog.

I’m one of the grandmothers in this allegedly nascent social media measurement marketplace. I actually started measuring the impact of consumer-generated content back in 1996, a decade before Twitter launched. And there’s been a lot of squawking and running around in circles since then.

As my New England farmer friends would say, “Kinda like herdin’ chickens. Ayuh.”

“Your audience is not anyone with a pulse.”

There’s always been a need among communicators for ways to set priorities. As my client Kathleen Buczko would say “Your audience is not anyone with a pulse.” Back in the day, we’d turn to the books (remember those things made from paper?) from Standard Rate & Data Service or Bacon’s and we’d page through them to find the publications with demographics that most closely matched our target audience. It was all based on readership surveys that purported to actually tell you who read what publications. But those surveys went out with the mimeo machine.

Never mind that the whole process was time consuming and generally out of date. It was the best we could do. Then those directories were published electronically and with just a few key strokes you could spam a whole bunch of people all at the same time with something that was supposed to be of interest to the reporters. (It seldom was.)

Then along came the Internet and the sky began to fall...

At first we tried to transfer old fashioned metrics to the Internet, for instance by using web traffic instead of impressions. (Web traffic, for most people, meant “hits,” which in my book always stood for: “How Idiots Track Success.”) And marketers loved those big web traffic numbers. But eventually they figured out that half of them are spambots, spiders, and search engines. Empty cackling or not, marketers like to count up millions of things, so it became an acceptable way to measure success.

Traditional providers of reach/circulation numbers like Nielsen and comScore jumped into the fray using panels to estimate how many people were actually going to each site. Other than the fact that at times their numbers varied by as much as 35 million, it worked for most people. Most importantly there were a lot of numbers and zeroes and commas in every report.

Then along came social media and once again all the headless chickens went scattering around the barnyard shouting about the sky falling because there was no perfect metric. Most of the sites they cared about were too small to show up on the Nielsen or Comscore panels. So along comes Compete and Alexa with opt-in systems to record what people were really doing on their computers. Once again the numbers varied pretty dramatically, but at least you could get numbers for a lot more blogs.

They Like me! They Like me!

Then there was Facebook. Because it was a closed and highly diverse network, it was nearly impossible to actually count “impressions” other than on your own site or for the total Facebook domain (now around 500 million).

But we forget that in marketing it’s all about me. If I put up a Facebook page, all I really want to know is how many people Like me. So counting up the number of people who hit the Like button in Facebook became the next great metric. Never mind that most people hit Like because they were promised 10% Off! or a Free Ticket! So what if they clicked once and never came back? “Growing the number of Likes” became the ROI of the day.

Except that it wasn’t ROI and wasn’t even an effective measure of the impact your efforts were having on anyone.

How tweet it is...

Alongside Likes came another equally insidious metric: the number of Twitter followers. It became all the rage to grow your Twitter followers as quickly as possible. So people figured out ways to auto follow people and numbers grew faster than a coop full of chickens can lay eggs. Of course most of those followers were faux followers who never paid any attention to what you’re really doing. But the numbers were big and all was well.

Then one day the numbers got too big. PR people, used to crowing (sorry) over getting 50 great “placements” or increasing the numbers of “media hits” from 100 to 200 per month, were now seeing 10,000 or 20,000 “hits” in social media. At first it was impressive. But then people started digging down into those pretty bar charts, and they realized that half of what was in there was crap. The crowing quickly turned to “The sky is falling, we can’t keep up, it’s overwhelming!”

So the mantra became “measure what matters.” (And, yes, TMS Editor Bill Paarlberg and I have even written a book about it.) But it’s not easy to pull out what matters from what doesn’t. And so the question of how to sort the good stuff from the mere chicken scratches now keeps the experts busy with terabytes of clucking about what is influential.

There is no doubt that influence is the buzzword of 2011. And, like last year's buzzword ROI, it will have a million interpretations. For now, influence must be determined by humans. But realistically, if a computer can play Jeopardy, it can measure influence. So improvements in technology will take care of some of the current problems of measuring influence.

I wager that a couple of years from now there will be no more than two or three influence measuring tools. The rest will have either been swallowed up, discredited, or otherwise fallen by the wayside. What we end up with will not be perfect, but it might be less confusing than the market is now.

What makes him a true Maven is that he is actually using his metrics. Measurement companies like mine produce hundreds, even thousands of research reports. Too often, we ship them off and have no idea what happens to them. We constantly wonder whether anyone actually reads our reports. And, like everyone else on the planet, we like to know that we’re needed and useful.

So when Todd told me recently about all the decisions his team had made based on the data we were providing—the insights the data provided and how it was shaping their 2011 plans—it literally made my year. Too often people think of measurement as a way to get the proverbial gold star, not as a way to improve their programs. So when someone does actually use it to make better decisions and drive improvements, we think they deserve our gold star. So congrats to Todd Morgano, our Measurement Maven of the Month.(Thanks to jericl cat for the image.)

Sarah Palin has built her reputation around a very specific image: the ultimate mama grizzly. The gun-toting, moose-killing, fish-catching politician who has great appeal with people who enjoy doing, or fantasizing about doing those activities. Her image has been built around her own personal style, which is distinctly “take me or leave me.” She follows the excellent advice my therapist gave me years ago: “Be who you are and see who is pleased.”

The problem with that positioning is that it’s going to alienate a certain percentage of the population. For instance, people who aren’t that wild about guns, and people who find her strident style distasteful.

The key to her reputation is in that “certain percentage.” There will always be some people who will love her and never leave her. But she is courting a far more fickle set of influencers called the American Public. If she is to be a viable candidate for office, or even a credible Republican Party spokesperson, a very good percentage of the American public has to buy into her image.

The problem is that, in the wake of the dreadful events in Tuscon on January 8th, the mood of the public has changed. Polls show that people are fed up with the strident tone of the political discourse. President Obama is enjoying a 15 point surge in approval ratings. Even Palin’s fellow Republicans are embracing civility as the mantle of the day.

So when she released a video that used the highly charged term “blood libel” to refer to the media response to the shootings in Tuscon, the words fell on ears that were tuned to a different channel.

January 19, 2011

It astounds me how many people still believe that public relations can be evaluated based on AVEs. After the Barcelona Principles, after years of research and discussion that show that AVEs do not reflect the real value of PR, and after the advent of so many more meaningful metrics, people are still determined to use AVEs.

Some have questioned why I continue to focus on AVEs now that both the Barcelona Principles and the IPR have come out against them. This is the reason. As long as professional PR people and their vendors are using AVEs, I will continue to shine a spotlight on these reprehensible practices. I hope to be able to turn that spotlight off sometime soon, but for now it is obviously still needed.

Take ReelForge, the East African media monitoring company that reported that: “Unprecedented media coverage of the Kenyan Premier League last season puts its value at a fat Sh686 million...”

There is so much wrong with this report I’m not sure where to begin. First off, to dignify the study that ReelForge conducted as a “survey” is a complete misnomer. ReelForge is a media monitoring company. They monitor media, and I seriously doubt they conducted a statistically valid survey of the Kenyan population to determine whether readers of articles about the Premier Leagues were likely to actually spend more on sponsor’s products.

Secondly, without any details behind the monitoring methodology, one has to wonder if they included all the negative articles.

According to Richard Manduku, ReelForge’s operations director, the valuation of the coverage was based on the current advertising rate cards of newspapers, TV, and radio firms. How many companies in Kenya pay for ads according to official rate cards? If it’s anything like the U.S., it’s probably about 5%. Manduku told The Daily Nation that: “The coverage of football on newspapers, TV, and radio is done for free. If one had to pay for equivalent space in the press and time on TV and radio, these are the figures that would be on his bill.”

But would the Kenyan Premier League have actually been willing to pay that bill?

Don Bartholomew’s MetricsMan blog can be counted on for posts that smoothly combine the theory and practice of public relations measurement and social media measurement. His thinking is very organized and tidy and grounded in the fundamentals and common sense. He makes measurement sound so do-able. And he makes the theoretical sound so, well, practical—usually wrapped up into a neat model with nice graphics, too.

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement StandardThe Measurement Standard is a publication ofKDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

About two years after my triplet children were born I learned about the theory of counterwill. Firsthand.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, here is an example:

Me: “Alison, please pick up the crayons.”

Alison: NO!

And another:

Me: “Claire, would you mind putting on your shoes?”

Claire: NO!

You don’t need a degree in child psychology to know that counterwill -- the desire to say ‘no’ to a direct order -- is a powerful, awe-inspiring, and unavoidable, force.

What happened to you during tax season?

You also don’t need to be a child to display it. You have almost undoubtedly exhibited counterwill yourself. It is particularly common in April, during tax season. When faced with the clear need to work on your income taxes you probably cleaned your house, fixed the broken lawn mower, and reorganized your hard drive before buckling down to the ugly accounting job you knew you had to do.

Counterwill is that little devil that sits on all of our shoulders and tells us to resist doing what we know we need to do. And counterwill is often a huge problem when it comes to writing.

Thanks for having me, Bill. The Institute for Public Relations, founded in 1956, is dedicated to developing “the science beneath the art of public relations.™” A little over ten years ago, several forward-thinking PR researchers – including Katie Paine, Walter Lindenmann, Mark Weiner, Lisa Richter, Bruce Jeffries-Fox, Forrest Anderson, and several others – created the Commission on Public Relations Measurement & Evaluation. The Commission exists to establish standards and methods for public relations research and measurement, and to issue authoritative best practices white papers.

The Commission has about 30 elected members representing leading-edge thinkers and practitioners in PR research measurement and evaluation drawn from four pillars: corporations and non-profit organizations, PR agencies, research and measurement firms, and universities.

TheSummit on Measurement, organized by Commission member Don Wright of Boston University, is the leading conference on PR measurement and evaluation. This conference, which owes its start to Katie Paine, has served as the model for other conferences taking place in the U.S. and around the world.

OK, so it's clear the Commission is active in promoting research and the bleeding edge of measurement. What is the Commission doing for the average person trying to actually do practical measurement, with modest programs, budgets, and aspirations?

We offer models for how to think through setting up and implementing measurement and evaluation programs. Look at the IPR white papers on setting measurable objectives, on measuring ROI, and many others. These explain best practices that all PR professionals can follow. We have a speakers bureau. And we regularly receive email questions from PR professionals, and do our best to provide expert answers.

Tell us a little about yourself and your previous work in measurement and PR. What are you most excited about?

I have an eclectic background including a Ph.D. in anthropology and an M.B.A. I have worked in market research. I spent nearly 15 years in PR research and measurement at Fleishman-Hillard. Now, I am Vice President of Research & Development at evolve24, a Maritz Research company. I am excited about using text analytics and data mining to extract information more rapidly to deliver decision-ready business insights.

What aspects of measurement do you find most rewarding?

Research, measurement, and evaluation are rewarding when they contribute to making smart business decisions. Measurement for the sake of measurement is like counting the pebbles on the beach.

What are your measurement pet peeves? And how do you plan to work them into the work of the Commission?

Third, the large volume of meaningless hype about measuring social media, especially from self-styled social media experts lacking a foundation in research, measurement, and evaluation. I look to the Commission to make contributions in this area by bringing sound measurement principles, standards, and best practices to social media measurement.

Have there been any controversial topics that the Commission has taken up? Any particularly sticky subjects or votes?

Thanks for talking with us, David. All the best in the future and thanks for your work on the IPR Measurement Commission.

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement StandardThe Measurement Standard is a publication ofKDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

January 11, 2011

Two recent articles may shake up your belief in the statistics and experimental methods behind public relations measurement and social media measurement.

A couple weeks ago in The New Yorker “The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method?” by Jonah Lehrer discussed the difficulty of replicating experimental findings. It seems that a “decline effect” makes experimental findings more difficult to replicate in subsequent experiments; experimental findings which, in early trials, appear to be highly significant, are often found to diminish and vanish in later trials. This effect has been found in research throughout the biological sciences.

If, like me, you come from a science and math background, this article is liable to both shake your faith in something you thought certain, and pique your curiousity as to why it happens. Is the decline effect due just to the tendency of journals to prefer experiments which find interesting results? Read the article.

Is any of this really important for public relations measurement? Perhaps. An awful lot of measurement studies crow about their positive results and blithely claim “statistical significance at the .05 level.” Heck, most of social and psychological research does the same thing.

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement StandardThe Measurement Standard is a publication ofKDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

January 10, 2011

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Tapping into Consumers’ Collective Unconscious

The “addict” sitting next to me laughed nervously. “It heals my pain. It releases chemicals in my brain that make me feel a little better. If you’re not having a good day, ice cream helps.”

Another chimed in. “I’m like an ‘Ice Cream Junkie.’ I get this feeling and I just have to have a little ice cream. It calms me down. Let’s face it, there are worse things than ice cream that we could be addicted to.”

Can people really be addicted to ice cream? Based on our market research for a major consumer packaged goods company, women crave this sweet treat and even describe it as an addiction -- sweet news indeed for the client that hired me to consult on its marketing strategy for a new frozen novelty.

Do you really know what motivates consumers to buy your products or services? Not just what they like, but why they like it and what moves them to purchase? Traditional demographic surveys and surface data can only tell you so much. In our experience, the key to establishing a lasting relationship with your customers lies in understanding the emotional connection between your customers and your brand. This case study will show how we identified the underlying emotions and motivations associated with our client’s new ice cream product.

The discussion described above was extremely valuable for identifying what separated ice cream from other snacks in the minds of primary grocery shoppers. Through focus groups, I explored the underlying feelings that motivated target customers to choose ice cream over other snack choices. Gradually and systematically, we explored three areas:

1. What differentiated ice cream from other snack choices, in the minds of consumers

2. The underlying psychological reasons people purchased ice cream

3. The image for my client’s new product that would best resonate with target consumers

We began with a sorting exercise in which consumers sorted 35 possible snack items into groups, based on the feelings generated when selecting a product to eat. After reviewing packages of pretzels, candy, crackers, cookies, nuts, granola bars, and ice cream-related choices, the respondents created a group of frozen novelties, which they referred to as “The Ice Cream Stash.”

Interestingly, this emotional need state for “something thick, cool and creamy that satisfies my craving” emerged spontaneously in four focus groups. My clients were glued to the one-way mirror, focusing on the differentiating benefits they heard that could serve as the basis for a marketing campaign for the new ice cream product they planned to launch.

The ensuing discussion provided the client with an extensive descriptive vocabulary that would be useful in the development of marketing materials, including “rich,” “luxurious,” “cool,” “smooth,” “creamy,” “thick,” “heavenly,” “indulgent,” and “satisfying.”

After accessing the emotions and descriptions associated with this new product, I gently dug deeper into the group’s collective unconscious. Displaying a deck of archetype cards, I asked the respondents to review the symbols on the cards and select three that they most closely associate with a non-ice cream snack (snack chips), their ideal “Ice Cream Stash” as well as with the new ice cream product they were evaluating.

Based on the 20th-century Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung’s identification of core images and instincts in the human psyche, the cards graphically represent universal archetypes and mythological figures such as “Mother,” “Mystic,” “Rebel,” and “Virgin.” Asking consumers to relate a product to these symbols helps us to tap into their unconscious associations, providing invaluable insights and imagery for the development of effective marketing campaigns. By requesting that consumers choose a card for snack chips as well as the “ideal” ice cream product and the new frozen novelty product, we would learn more about “The Ice Cream Stash” and how closely the new product meets this emotional need state. The cards would help us obtain a clear picture of how consumers see the new product and the story that my client’s marketing needed to tell in order to drive sales.

The respondents’ choices of archetype cards for the two ice cream products were similar and very revealing: “Mystic,” Lover,” and “Healer.” Consistently across all four groups, women described “the power of ice cream” to comfort, restore, and heal them, both from everyday challenges as well as from the craving for ice cream. The new product clearly met the identified consumer need state for “The Ice Cream Stash.”

“When you’re feeling sad about something -- maybe after a bad blind date -- you eat ice cream…and you feel a little better, because you have something that satisfies you.”

On the other hand, respondents’ choices for snack chips imagery were more straight-forward and less emotional. They focused on the archetypes of Transformer and Companion, explaining that they typically paired chips with another product such as a dip and tended to take them for granted; they didn’t consider them to be particularly special.

One respondent articulated, “After all, you don’t race over to your best friend’s house with a big bag of chips after she’s just been dumped by some guy. You take a quart of ice cream and two spoons. Ice cream comforts and heals.”

With that remark, I knew we were done. The research led to the creation of a marketing campaign for the new product based on “the mystical powers of ice cream.” Imagery and fanciful copy positioned the new frozen novelty as a soothing, comforting sweet treat that rescues women from everyday struggles.

Our psychological approach went beyond the typical surface reactions to a new product’s taste, texture and appearance to exploring the underlying emotions of the target consumer -- getting at feelings they probably didn’t even know they had about ice cream. By tapping into the consumer’s unconscious, my client was now in a very good position for moving forward with a compelling marketing strategy for the new ice cream product.

Because consumers may forget what a brand says or does, but they will always remember how a brand makes them feel.

Jenny Schade is president of JRS Consulting, Inc., a firm that helps organizationsbuild leading brands and efficiently attract and motivate employees and customers.

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement StandardThe Measurement Standard is a publication ofKDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

We’re guessing that, if it isn't already on your to-do list (or quarterly performance objectives), putting in place some sort of measurement is one of most communications folks’ New Year’s resolutions. With the information in this article, that’s a resolution that will be easy to keep. Or a least a whole lot easier than those other resolutions you made in the past few days and probably flunked out of already.

Public relations or social media measurement doesn't have to be a big deal. We've rounded up plenty of ways you can get started without spending much time or money at all. In fact, for several of our tips below, the service is free and the data gets delivered right to your in-box. Of course, if you want to get beyond the newbie stuff you might have to click around the Web some, do some reading, maybe break a sweat thinking about what your data means. (Relax -- that's a different article.)

Here are a few quick and painless techniques to get you started:

1. Get with Google:

Sign up for Google Alerts for your organization or brand, and for at least three of your competitors or peers. Then tell your boss you have installed a crisis alert monitoring system.

Put Google Analytics on every website that you control. (Yeah, the instructions need a serious usability makeover, but once you get the code, you just paste it into all your pages. Cake.) Then tell your boss you don't need no stinking WebTrends. (Actually, you probably do need WebTrends if you have to do advanced analyses -- it's much more robust and customizable -- but we're talking quick and easy here.)

2. Time for Twitter:

Go ahead and get yourself on Twitter. You know you have been thinking about it. Give it a shot and see what happens.

And even if you don't want to start Tweeting yourself, you can still set up an RSS feed for a Twitter Search on your brand/s, your competition, and anything else you want to keep track of. Tell your boss you've implemented a Twitter monitoring system.

And for you heavy Twitter users, see how influential you -- or your boss -- is on Twitter: Go to www.twitalyzer.com

3. Educate yourself:

Stay on top of the trends in social media with a click or two: socialmediabiz.comwill send you daily email updates.

Read Katie Delahaye Paine's bookHow to Measure Public Relationships. Oops, too bad, it’s out of print. You’ll have to wait until March 15th to buy the 2nd Edition: Measure What Matters from Wiley Press. Read more about it at the Measure What Matters blog.

Now put together a dashboard to help you track your data and progress. Plus, it will impress the heck out of your boss.Whatever metrics you actually have, put them in an Excel spread sheet and set up Key Performance Indicators. For some ideas on how to set it up and several sample charts and tables, download this sample engagement dashboard. (And for more ideas on how to use the sample dashboard, read #7. below.) Update your data and KPIs each month, adjust your program(s) as needed, and progress confidently toward success.

7. Extra Credit: Track your engagement

Engagement is the really big payoff. When you translate your clicks, friends, visitors, and other data into an engagement framework, then you have a much better sense of what kind of a relationship you have with people. And whether or not they are becoming more likely to actually buy or donate or otherwise show up in your revenue stream.First, study up just a little on engagement by reading this excerpt from Katie Paine’s upcoming book Measure What Matters: “Online Engagement and How To Measure It.” As you read it, consider how your own data demonstrates how your customers become more engaged with your products or organization. Now, if you haven’t done so already, download the sample engagement dashboard and take a look at the first chart.

You want to know if you are moving people along the engagement spectrum, from less engaged to more engaged. So set up the tables in your dashboard with columns for not just the total number of likes, comments, followers, and other stats, but for the increase or decrease in those stats from month to month. Now you are tracking engagement.

And if all this is a bit too much for you, just write us or give us a call (603.752.5111) and we’ll be happy to discuss your measurement needs and how we can help you with them.

January 04, 2011

How much is a unique visitor worth on the Internet? Depends on who you are.

Amazon (e-commerce) is generating $189 per user. Google (search) is generating $24 per user. Facebook (social networking) is only generating $4 per user according to this chart from JP Morgan's Imran Khan.

Khan is optimistic Facebook starts bringing in more revenue over time. He sees Facebook as a new platform for the web and thinks it will be able to pick up revenue from applications and games.

The most popular series of articles in The Measurement Standard’s 100-issue history has been Katie Paine’s Measurement Checklists. They are the quick-and-handy step-by-step way to plan and organize your next public relations measurement project.

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement StandardThe Measurement Standard is a publication ofKDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.